The Free Gift, and a day for rejoicing
Two posts the sermon archive named but never filed: a guest Lent sermon on Romans 5, and the rector's own words on a census and a changed Britain.
Pinned by The Notice Board · Entry checked on · 3 min
On 13 March 2011, the first Sunday of Lent, the parish posted a sermon by a guest preacher working through Genesis and Romans. On 12 December 2012, the rector posted something closer to a reflection than a sermon, built around a single day's news. The sermon archive already names the second post in passing; neither post had its own slip until now. Put side by side, they show the board carrying two different kinds of public nerve: a hard text argued through, and a personal story told in public.
A guest in the pulpit, for Lent
The Lent 1 sermon is credited to Graham MacFarlane, not the rector, and its readings are given in full: Genesis 2.15-17 and 3.1-7, Romans 5.12-19, Matthew 4.1-11, the temptation narrative paired with the Fall and with Paul's reading of both. The sermon opens by naming the awkwardness head on: Jesus taught his disciples to pray "lead us not into temptation," yet every Lent the church follows him into the wilderness to be tempted. MacFarlane's answer is that Lent is not a yearly test of willpower. It is, in his words, "a time designated for acknowledging and repenting of our ongoing solidarity with Adam," read alongside a thanksgiving for a parallel solidarity with Christ.
What the sermon actually argued
The sermon's centre is a close reading of Paul's parallel between Adam and Christ in Romans 5. Paul writes, as the sermon quotes him, that "the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification." MacFarlane is careful to block the easy misreading: Adam and Christ are not equal and opposite terms in a cancelling equation. Adam's trespass is, in the sermon's argument, everyone's trespass, held in common; Christ's free gift is not its mirror but something of a different order entirely, "immeasurably greater." The sermon even offers its own image for the relationship, Christ as a man standing in a puddle, his reflection in the water an image of him but upside down, insubstantial and distorted, which is how the sermon reads Adam against Christ. It is dense, exegetical preaching, the kind the board's other guest sermon, the Trinity 11 piece on division, also kept on the record.
A census, and the rector's own story
The December 2012 post sits in a different register entirely. It opens with a question lifted from that week's press: "Is being a Christian now a political statement?", a line the rector attributes to Nelson Jones, writing in the New Statesman on 11 December 2012, the day the 2011 census figures on religion for England and Wales were published. The rector reads the falling number of people describing themselves as Christian not as a loss to mourn but, in his phrase, a day "for celebration," because people were choosing their own description freely rather than keeping an inherited label. He sets that freedom against the Edict of Milan of 313 CE, the moment when, in his reading, "the status of the Christians changed overnight", and argues that the church's only durable political claim was never that edict's kind of standing, but the cross itself.
The post then turns personal. The rector recalls arriving in Edinburgh in 1997 to train for ministry, having come, in his account, from the Middle East, and expecting to find a visibly Christian Britain. He found instead, in his words, "ordinary people who were generally kind and good," and a church study group that did not welcome his observation that Britain was not, in practice, a Christian nation. The post does not resolve the disagreement; it simply records that he said it once, met resistance, and still thought it true more than a decade on.
Two voices, one board
Neither post argues the same thing, and the board does not need them to. The Lent sermon faces an old text and refuses to soften it; the December post faces a day's headline and a personal memory, and refuses to soften that either. Both were posted under the parish's own name, the guest sermon signed to its preacher, the reflection signed to the rector, and both are the kind of public nerve a congregation either tolerates in its clergy or does not. St John's kept both on the record.
How the board files it
Two slips, pinned twenty-one months apart on the calendar and much further apart in genre: a guest preacher's Lent sermon on Adam and Christ, and the rector's own reckoning with a census and a decade-old disagreement. The sermon archive already knew the second post by its title. This is the slip where it finally gets pinned.
